The porn’s pretty nice, I guess.

So, Zootopia’s out now in a lot of places. Mine is not one of them. However, I think that the inherent existence of Zootopia as a ‘real thing’ that has emphatically ‘happened’ recently is actually something that warrants a truly special look at this big, broad, wonderful fandom of ours and exactly what it is we love about it.

Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s more that I’m sitting here in my chair, procrastinating writing the next scene of the Blood and Water novel because I’m a fucking nutcase who can’t stop worrying about whether it’s good enough and actually write the scene. Maybe I just want an excuse to take an introspective look at the fandom through my own eyes and what it means to me, what it’s capable of meaning, and what it’ll mean for the presumably legion new fans that Disney’s new cash cow is going to bring in for us. Regardless of the why, here’s my thoughts (admittedly born during a particularly lovely shower) on why, exactly, I like furry stuff.

When I came to the fandom incoherent mumbling years ago, it was art that brought me in. Sexual art, actually. I was working on a school project that brought it to my attention at first, and it was entirely by fluke that I found it. To every graymuzzle out there who remembers PureYiff, I give a hearty thumbs-up. So I was thrown in the deep end, during my teenage years, of the furry fandom. The deep, spooge-swollen depths.

But it wasn’t the pornographic aspect of the artwork that I saw that really caught my eye. Instead, it was the quality of the art. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I couldn’t draw to save my life. If you put a gun to my head and you told me to draw anything, let alone something as complex as a person? I’d click the safety off for you. It was never gonna happen. Seeing different artists all working together on this one simple sub-genre of artwork was amazing to me. I’d always enjoyed cartoons and cartoon creatures, but this was something else entirely. This was adult, this was intimate, and this was inherently real to me. It was a side of anthropomorphism that I’d never seen before, and it was this adult side that hooked me.

I’d seen Robin Hood and I adored The Lion King and I was spoon-fed a whole slew of anthropomorphic characters over the years, from talking quadrupeds to upright pants-wearers. My first furry crush was [REDACTED] when I was in grade four. I believe a grand total of two people in the world know who that character was. One of them is me. Neither of us understand what the appeal was. But it wasn’t until much later, when confronted with the adult side of anthropomorphism that I could take those strange feelings between my legs and ascribe something else to them. I could understand something in a new way.

All the cartoons that I had grown up watching and adoring were amazing, but sterile. They existed in a creative space where the normal rules didn’t apply. Anvils dropped on coyotes and hilarity ensued. Physics was a plaything. Faced for the first time with the sight of sexualized animal people, I came to an inherent understanding: anthropomorphism doesn’t just have to be comedy. Anthropomorphism can be a lot more, and it can be something truly powerful.

My first foray, some may remember, into furry writing a long time ago was Tales of Sol. Originally conceived as a pair of stories, one was designed to set up the characters and the sci-fi universe and the other was going to be that which I thought had to be done at the time: hardcore (heterosexual… gasp!) sex. It ballooned out into a seven story series with a relatively truncated sex scene just prior to the climax that, while important to the plot and the characters involved, could have just as easily been the tasteful fade-to-black that later edits of the scene would have. I had taken the sexualized side of furry that I’d seen, extracted from it adult themes and adult behaviour (including sex) and fearlessly crafted a world around it.

As much experimentation as anything else, it was my first step toward understanding what anthropomorphism can be. A lot of your who have followed my stories for a while know that every now and again, I can go dark with a lot of my stuff. Even the stories that are sprinkled in amongst feel-good-fap-good furry porn can have some terrible themes associated with them (Fae’s Christmas Music-Themed Special alone over the years has dealt with domestic abuse, homelessness, self-prostitution (in two different contexts), hateful and trapping relationships and emotional fallout to name just a few things) can have powerful thematic elements that can help them to rise beyond simply a means to blow your load.

Writing fiction is, from the moment I discovered that anyone could do it if they just worked at it hard and long enough, all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’ve gravitated naturally toward fantasy and science-fiction, because speculative fiction allows one the complete freedom to explore whatever themes one wants to explore. You can, in science-fiction, discuss an idea that would be touchy if it was based on earth with contemporary human characters. You can for example take the idea of an alien race that humanity conquered and enslaved, extrapolate to their freedom and integration into human society, and tell a story of systemic racism in the post-freedom era. Speculative fiction provides a degree of separation that allows for an issue like that, or the nature of progression versus conservatism, or the threat of a tech-dominated world, or any number of other things to be discussed and absorbed without the inherent ugliness that those discussions can bring about. Especially in this current age of socially- and politically-correct walking-on-eggshells we have. Speculative fiction allows you to wrap a theme that might be rejected into an entertaining medium that people will take in, discuss and debate. Speculative fiction greases the gears of critical thought and consideration, and this I think makes it one of the most underappreciated and powerful genres of writing.

Furry is the same thing. Anthropomorphization of animals allows human traits and intelligence to be assigned them, but it also allows for the human condition to be explored in different ways. Furry fiction provides a means for us to tackle our humanity with a degree of separation that I believe lets us look at our lives more critically. It allows us to observe our society through a lens, focus on an issue and deal with that issue in an entertaining and appealing way. It is, in much the same way as speculative fiction as a genre, something that I believe will be increasingly essential to how we understand ourselves as a species and each other as a society.

There’s a lot of jokes running around right now regarding Zootopia, and a whole lot of furries that are convinced that it’s either the best thing ever for the fandom or the absolute worst thing since [Insert Most Recent Overblown Furry Crisis Here]. There’s a lot of comments about non-furs making ‘zoosonas’ or thinking that Nick or Judy or those tigers or whatever are hot in spite of not being furries themselves.

Which… c’mon. They are, each in their own way, pretty hot.

But without having seen the movie and while trying to avoid any spoilers that I can, I doubt that a company as smart as Disney has simply made a fur fandom cash grab. They (probably) did not spend millions of dollars just so we, as a collective fandom, can rush out and buy their overpriced shit. They (I guess) did not write this movie for the fandom specifically. We are many but we are not exactly fucking legion and, while our spending habits regarding consuming content in place of consuming food are well-documented and often shameful examples of fur fandom lore, this movie is not just for us.

What I have heard is that it is a well-written (if plot-predictable) movie that is well- and entertainingly told. Given that, I have to assume that Disney has been smart about their writing. I have to assume that they have made good use of anthropomorphic characters in this movie to tell a good story in a good way. I have to believe that the use of anthro characters has been used to tell that story and confront very real, very human concerns. Certainly the trailers for it made me laugh and Disney has a generally exemplary record with making expressive and interesting looking characters, but if what I heard about Zootopia is right they have done precisely the kind of thing that I think the fandom needs. They have done what I like to do. They have approached human issues with furry characters.

This fandom can be a pain in the arse for a lot of its members. I have friends that have lost their gorram minds over the years because of the nature of the fandom’s inhabitants and some of the frankly stupid shit that they get up to. I have friends that have had to step back from it just so they can breathe without being choked out by people making absurd claims. Just today I had one such friend tell me a story about how a reader once accused him of having an anti-feline agenda. A fucking anti-feline agenda.

Let that sink in for a second.

And yet, in spite of that, I love creating content for the fandom. I love writing with anthro characters. I have a hell of a lot more fun with them than I do with human characters, unless I need human characters specifically to tell a particular story. I love the physicality of their expression. I love the abstraction of the human condition through a furry lens. I love the sheer volume of creativity that oozes out of this massive conglomeration we call a fandom. Yes, there’s a lot of bullshit to wade through sometimes, but fucking Christ is it worth it in the end.

I love furry. Unashamedly, unabashedly, warts and all. I love it for what it was, I love it for what it is, and I love it for what it still has the potential to become. The fandom is evolving and maturing every single day, and I wholeheartedly believe that I am not the only one who believes this to be the case. I can’t be the only content creator out there who sees the enormous potential of what is, to so many of us, just a cute hobby.

Through it all, I remember that the oft-ridiculed porn of the fandom is what opened my eyes. I remember that despite all the jokes and poor conception of the fandom because of the sexualized aspect of furry characters, that was what awoke in me the idea that abstraction of human issues through anthropomorphism could be a powerful and fun writing tool. I love the fandom, and I love it warts and all, and the sexual aspect of the fandom is not one of those warts to me. The adult side of furry has been, to me, a creative gateway to greater things.

So yeah. The porn’s pretty good, I guess.